At Palazzo Strozzi from 14 March to 23 August 2026, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents one of the most important exhibitions in Italy ever devoted to Mark Rothko.
After the major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2023, this year the American painter Mark Rothko is celebrated with a remarkable exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in the historic Centre of Florence. Curated by Elena Geuna and Christopher Rothko – his second son, collector, and essayist of his father’s artistic work – the solo show pays tribute to the connection between Mark Rothko and the Tuscan city. In the mid-twentieth century, the artist was able to confirm the insights he had studied in books and New York museums, thereby “consolidating his self-perception as a painter operating within the context of a historical-artistic tradition” as his son Christopher confirms. It seems that his visits to Italy in 1950, 1959 – on the occasion of his participation at the Venice Biennale – and 1966 inspired him to create timeless art that, much like the works encountered during his journeys, might continue to resonate through the centuries.
The Florentine exhibition, specifically conceived for Palazzo Strozzi, incorporates additional venues where visitors can experience Rothko’s paintings in direct interaction with early Renaissance painting and high Renaissance architecture: at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco in Florence, in dialogue with Fra Angelico, and at the Laurentian Library, set against the architecture of Michelangelo. Especially evocative is the silence that envelops visitors within the vestibule of the historic library, a site typically less frequented by the public. Transitioning abruptly from the bustle of the vibrant city center near the Duomo, one is suddenly confronted by two delicate abstract watercolors on paper inside the magnificent, two-toned monumental staircase. Here, one can contemplate the painter’s focus on essential elements: a dominant bichrome palette and linear pictorial motifs. His son Christopher states that the exhibition represents the culmination of an inquiry spanning approximately fifteen years, aimed at identifying the optimal context in which to present his father’s works within this city, “which vibrates with both art and life”.
It is nevertheless recommended to begin with the chronologically arranged retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi. Here, starting with his early works, one can trace the artistic trajectory of Mark Rothko, born in the Russian Empire as Markus Rothkowitz. Thus, the painter’s 1936 self-portrait – created by the artist who had immigrated to the United States with his parents as a child – still bears the signature of his birth name. Painted in a figurative, expressionist style, the work reveals the influence of Old Master portraiture, particularly in its use of chiaroscuro and a warm, tonal palette. It depicts the newly married man, who had already held his first solo exhibition and was a founding member of both the Artists Union in New York and the artist group The Ten – a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and Expressionism – in a three-quarter profile, his gaze directed at the viewer. He posed in a suit, shirt, and tie, his hair neatly styled and his eyes concealed behind thick-lensed glasses. This composition establishes a formal, restrained quality that aligns with his subsequent development toward abstract forms. Only two years later, in 1938, he obtained American citizenship, and in January 1940, he changed his name to Mark Rothko. While the exhibition shifts from early figurative works into abstract composition via several surrealist-inspired paintings, a particular loan from Kate Rothko Prizel, the eldest child of the painter, and her husband Ilya Prizel, merits special attention: the untitled watercolor on paper from 1946, painted the year after Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at her museum-gallery Art of This Century in New York in 1945. Very similar to his artwork Sacrifice from 1946 of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which has recently been on show at the Museum on the Grand Canal, the example of Joan Miró is here evoked, shifting toward the complete abstraction of Rothko’s mature style. It is striking how it anticipates the horizontal zoning of his characteristic Color-Field paintings. From here it is just a step to the iconic pieces on massive scale that viewers physically involve by the color, losing their sense of self in the artwork.
The most impressive loan of the Florence exhibition comes from the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum: Untitled, 1952-1953, extends on an entire wall of the Renaissance Palazzo Strozzi with 299,5 x 442,5 cm. With two light yellow color lines over a bright red ‘baseline’ it is illuminating not only the room where it hangs in, but the entire exhibition. Walking through the following two decades of dark brown, black and red paintings until the death of the painter, who died by suicide in 1970, the glimpse back to happier days through the rooms of the exhibition space is quite enchanting.
Mark Rothkoʼs most powerful and well-known installation The Rothko Chapel in Houston with fourteen paintings in varying hues of black, is evocated in the last exhibition room with loans by the Rothko Chapel Collection: various Untitled works with ink on paper. What is missing, is the one of Morton Feldman’s best known pieces of music which was inspired by and written to be performed in the chapel called Rothko Chapel (1971) for choir, viola, celesta, percussion, and solo voices. But it will be performed during the Maggio musicale and it is recreated in a small, intimate listening room in the Sacrestia of Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. Placed inside a complex established in 1221 by Dominican friars, it is worth closing the visit in meditation and contemplation in a sort of anticamera of what is considered the oldest pharmacy in the world.
LINK
- Becoming Academy: Marina Abramović in Venice - September 18, 2026
- The Generative Dispositif of Institutional Memory. An Interview with Dayanita Singh - June 19, 2026
- Mark Rothko in Florence - March 27, 2026
